Hometown Diner leaving Ottawa for New Hampshire

OTTAWA — The Hometown Diner in Ottawa will be moving to New Hampshire next week.

Tim Halliday, the new owner of the diner, expects to move it out of Ottawa on Tuesday morning. It will be traveling more than 700 miles from Locust and East 11th streets to Range, N.H.

Halliday said he had been looking for a diner for nearly four years.

“I began talking to Matt Kaplanow, the former owner of the diner, about four months ago, and we began negotiating,” said Halliday.

He said his town is a small college town of 4,500 with a lot of lakes.

“There’s no place to have breakfast in my town,” Halliday said “I’ve always liked diners over restaurants, so I have been looking to buy one.”

He said many diners he saw were either in poor shape or had already been sold by the time he heard about them. Halliday is excited to be the new owner of the 1949 Silk City vintage diner. Before moving to Ottawa, it was the Silver Diner in Kentucky.

“Because of all the logistics, we can only move the diner,” Halliday said. He said he will tear down the 1,453 square-foot addition that was built at the Ottawa location. The diner will retain the same name at the new location. Halliday plans to make the kitchen slightly larger.

General contractor Burton Smith, of North Baltimore, is doing the work on preparing the diner for its move.

The diner will be taken by truck to its new location by the same company delivered it to Ottawa.

The diner was opened in Ottawa in August 2010, after Kaplanow had it restored in Cleveland.

Kaplanow, a German native, had lived in Ottawa while he attended Lima Technical College in the 1980s. He chose to have a diner in Ottawa because he still has many friends and family members in the area.

Cindy Landwehr with the Putnam County Commissioners office said Kaplanow received a $197,000 revolving loan toward equipment in the project. When the building sold in March, the proceeds went towards this loan.

“We received more than half of the outstanding balance,” Landwehr said.